


My Daddy Was a Planet

by glorious_spoon



Series: Hurt/Comfort Bingo 2018 [8]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 11:03:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16722135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: Not long after the confrontation on Ego's planet, Mantis and Peter Quill have a late-night encounter in the mess hall.





	My Daddy Was a Planet

**Author's Note:**

> For a tumblr prompt by zivitz, who asked for Peter and Mantis, non shippy/siblingish, survivor’s guilt. 
> 
> Fills the 'survivor's guilt' square on my H/C Bingo card.

She is alone in the mess hall when she hears footsteps approaching on the metal decking. It’s late by her circadian clock; the others call it the morning watch, but it corresponds to no definition of morning that she has learned in her time with Ego. The ship is dark, the crew asleep. Drax, who is her friend, and Gamora, beautiful furious frightened Gamora, are on watch, but they haven’t moved from the bridge in hours.

The others all take a watch shift. She does not. No one has offered her one, and she does not know if she should ask.

No one else should be awake, though. Is the point.

She is accustomed to remaining awake while others sleep. In her life, those have been some of her best, most peaceful moments. When Ego’s vast and ancient mind finally quieted to a hum she could ignore, when his children rested in the beds that were so briefly theirs, tear-stained and soothed into sleep by her hands and power.

She was gentle with them. She was always as gentle as she could be, gentle in ways she never was with her master. He never required her gentleness, and it was not a gift she could bring herself to offer him. Only his children. They were so young, all of them. So frightened. Ego always said that they never felt a thing, but Ego understood so little of the ways that living things feel pain.

Mantis understands very little about the universe, but pain--that she knows intimately. Sometimes, viciously, she hopes that Ego came to understand a little of it at the very end.

“Hey,” says a soft voice, and she turns to look at Peter Quill as he approaches cautiously, hesitates, then rests his hand on the back of the nearest chair without sitting. “What are you doing up?”

She smiles, reflexively. He is the only one of Ego’s children that she has met who has grown to adulthood, and there’s more than a little of Ego’s Terran shape in the structure of his face and the color of his hair, the tenor and rhythm of his voice; enough to awaken her habitual impulse to soothe, to yield. To keep him as safe and harmless and happy as she can.

It was never enough. Never. She has met many hundreds of Peter Quill’s siblings, and none of them lived past puberty, no matter how hard she tried.

“Should I be sleeping?” she asks, still smiling. “I am sorry. I do not know the correct rules yet. I will go back to bed.”

She begins to stand, and Peter Quill puts out a hand, taking a step back. “No, no, hey, look, that’s not what I meant. Sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?” she asks, nonplussed. His brow furrows.

“What?”

“You’re sorry. Why?”

“I just—it’s just an expression. Okay? You were here first, I’m not trying to chase you out.”

His hand leaves the back of the chair; he takes a step back. He has, for the most part, been careful about coming close enough to touch her since she first met him on Ego’s ship, since she first laid hands on him and felt that deep, warm, sweet love he holds for Gamora. Embarrassment is something she has rarely experienced; it took a furious hissed lesson from Gamora for her to understand the sharp ending of that sweetness.

She has embarrassed him, and he’s reluctant to allow it again. But that is not what this is. There’s a caution in the way he moves, the way he stands back from her and shifts so that she could easily get around him if she needed to.

This is not embarrassment. This is something else. This is _concern_.

No one has ever been concerned for her before. Not over something so minor as her emotional comfort. She does not quite know how to respond to it. “You were not chasing me.”

His smile takes on a resigned tilt. “Sorry. Metaphor. I just meant—”

“I understand metaphors.”

“Oh,” he says. And then, still careful, hands held where she can see them. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

“Does that matter?” It is his ship. It has never mattered before if she minded something. But his face looks suddenly stricken, as though she has accused him of something monstrous. He pulls away from the table, steps past her.

“Of course it matters. Look, I’m just gonna grab something and then I'll be out of your—”

She reaches out to catch his arm as he passes.

She does not mean to do it. But her hands brush bare skin where his sleeve ends and she is suddenly hollow, ringing like a bell with—

\-- _grief exhaustion regret—_

\--he flinches away, boots scuffing at the floor. Her hand drops.

She lowers her eyes. “I am sorry.”

He takes another couple of steps back, then says, “It’s fine.”

“I could make you sleep.”

“What?” he asks.

“It was my purpose. Why Ego kept me. I could make him sleep.”

“I remember,” Peter says, his voice cracked and strange.

“I made his children sleep, too.” Her hands flex in her lap; she forces them to still. Forces her face to be calm and pleasant. “Before he killed them. He did not like to see them suffer.”

There’s a sudden jolt, a hard breath through his nose, and then he says, “You gotta be kidding me. That son of a—”

Footsteps move behind her. A cabinet door opens, then shuts with a hard click. Soft cursing beneath his breath, Terran phrases that the implant in his neck doesn’t quite translate correctly.

She hears the sound of a seal releasing, liquid splashing in a glass. A sudden sharp smell of intoxicants, and then he’s leaning over her shoulder, warm and close, and thumping a plastisteel glass of green liquid on the table in front of her. She looks up. Another glass is clutched in his fingers, and he takes a long drink of it before circling the table to the far side, where the curving wall has an exterior window that shows the stars, prickling lights in the blackness.

She reaches out to touch the glass with one finger. Moisture is already starting to accumulate on its smooth surface.

“I can go, if you want,” Peter says from the far side of the table. She lifts her head. He isn’t looking at her; instead he’s contemplating the liquid inside his glass. His hair is falling into his face, his jaw unshaven, dark circles beneath his eyes. He’s wearing soft sleeping-clothes instead of his Ravager gear, bare feet shoved into unlaced boots.

From this angle, he doesn’t look like Ego at all.

She curves her fingers around the glass and raises it carefully to her lips. The liquid burns as she swallows it, a hot-sweet fire that settles in her belly and warms her. “No.”

“No?” he asks, sounding surprised.

“No. I would like to not be alone.” She thinks he would like that too. She cannot sense thoughts, not really. But she knows the flavor of loneliness all too well.

Peter breathes out a laugh, then says, “Yeah, me too. Cheers.” He lifts his glass and leans across the table, holding it out toward her. She stares at it, and he says, “You clink your glass against it. _Gently_ , I don’t need a repeat of Drax smashing all the dishware—”

“Drax is very funny,” Mantis says, beaming, and clinks her glass against his.

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Peter mutters, but he’s smiling as he leans back against the cabinets.


End file.
